Fundraising: no longer your dirty secret
Do your peers in other departments know what you do?
The last two years has seen fundraising come under media scrutiny and distrust. We need to find ways to overcome this.
Our Fundraising Fair trainer, Samuel Butler, Director of Fundraising and Communications, Tibet Relief Fund shares three ways to ensure fundraising doesn’t feel like a ‘dirty secret’ and gives a preview of his session:
The importance of working with internal teams outside of fundraising
You can achieve this by building relationships with their members, and finding mutual benefits in what you are both trying to achieve. From communication teams (Brand, PR, Marketing) to your project teams, and volunteers, by taking a holistic approach to your over-riding charitable purpose, you can find better ways of combining. Often improving the results you are both after, simply by working together with a better understanding of what it is you do.
Developing processes that can give senior figures faith in your fundraising
Where third parties are concerned there are some simple training and recruitment processes that you can develop and implement, to help maintain a level of confidence in your brand being upheld. Your image being maintained, whilst it is being represented by an agency partner, or temporary staff is often a concern. By introducing safeguarding policies, and auditing longer standing agencies, this will improve your charities trust in those third parties that you employee to fundraise.
Providing your peers in other departments with a better understanding of what you do
Just because you have done it for a long time, it doesn’t mean that your Head of Communications will! Building structures for combined team meetings, bringing all communications under one roof, you can plan effectively, and help professional relationships to develop for the wider benefit of the charity, your supporters, customers and your beneficiaries. PR, marketing, brand and communication teams can amplify the voice your charity has if you are all saying the same thing. But they need to know what it is that you have to say!
